A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

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The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."

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Thursday, August 8, 2013

AUTUMNAL THOUGHTS IN MID-SUMMER

I have just finished reading J. K. Rowling's new detective novel, The Cuckoo's Calling. It is splendid, and I look forward to a series of Cormoran Strike mysteries from her pen. I shan't spoilt the book for any of you who might be inclined to read it by revealing the ending, but I do want to say one or two words about the very last lines of the novel. Rowling concludes with six lines of poetry. She does not identify their source, relying on a literate readership to recognize these very famous words. I blush to admit that I had not a clue, but Google identified them immediately as coming from Tennyson's poem Ulysses. Let us just admit that I had an inadequate education. When I read the entire poem, I was deeply moved by it, for it spoke directly to the situation in which I now find myself. I hope it will be clear to you what I mean by this. Here, without further commentary, is the entire poem:

8 comments:

Hmm...Judi Dench, playing M, read those very same six lines in scene in "Skyfall" in which she was testifying before a British sub-committee on intelligence failures at MI6. The scene was enhanced by cutaways to Bond (Daniel Craig) running at full speed through the streets of London, trying to thwart an attempt on her life by the terrorist Silva (Javier Bardem). The underlying theme of the film was the relevance of a Cold War relic like Bond to the modern-day high-tech world of intelligence gathering and operations.

That's fascinating. You figure Rowling must know that, right, even if dopes like me don't. Or are those six lines so famous? I would have thought the opening lines, or maybe the very end of the poem, would be more often quoted.

It's interesting that those very lines from Tennyson would appear in a film and a novel that were released about the same time. Not sure if they're the UK equivalent of our "Two roads diverged..." I took the lines from Tennyson as a sort of metaphor for the modern-day relevance of the UK. Who knows, Tony Blair might've promoted them as part of his "Cool Britannia" campaign. ;-)

These five final lines were also quoted by (1) Ted Kennedy in 1980 after losing the Democratic nomination for president, and by (2) Rod Blagojevich after being impeached by the Illinois House of Representatives in 2009. Everybody seems to fancy that defiance is always heroic.....

Actually, I know the poem well, having taken up Harold Bloom's challenge to his students whenever he teaches it to learn it by heart. I tend to take notice of mentions in popular culture (the final line was carved in letters 3-feet high on a low wall in the Olympic village for the London 2012 Olympics), and am constantly amused by the self-serving mis-interpretations suffered by this darkly ambiguous verse. (As Bloom points out, the final lines are positively Satanic - in the Miltonian sense). Another poem that seems defenceless against grotesque mis-interpretations by the popular mind is Frost's "Road not Taken". Ego-projection is a powerful thing.

Acastos, I would LOVE a guest post on this whole subject, if you wanted to undertake it. By the way, I stand in awe of your ability to memorize an entire poem longer than six lines. In high school we were required to memorize the first ten lines of Marc Anthony's well-known speech [Friends, Romans, countrymen ...] and it damned near kept me from graduating.

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.